This invention concerns an improved poultry cut-up method and apparatus, in which a previously slaughtered and eviscerated, oven-ready poultry carcass is cut in sections.
In the past, poultry carcasses have been removed from the overhead conveyor line in a processing plant and moved through various cutting equipment to separate the legs, thighs, and wings from the carcass, and to divide the main portion of the carcass into sections. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,943,600 describes a system for cutting apart poultry carcasses with the whole carcass entering a machine and the carcass being divided as it moves through the machine. Also, U.S. Pat. No. 3,624,863 describes a cut up machine in which poultry carcasses are mounted on mandrels and advanced through a series of cutting stations. U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,016,624, 3,930,282, 4,251,901, 4,306,335, and 4,385,421 describe other examples of how poultry carcasses can be cut apart.
While the prior art poultry cut-up machines have been successful to a limited extent, the most popular cut-up machines do not handle an entire carcass because the carcasses are not all the same in size and proportion and these variations tend to cause the machines for cutting the entire carcass to improperly cut the carcass. Rather, the most widely used cut-up machines receive one half of a previously cut carcass, either the saddle or the breast. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,385,421 describes a cut-up machine that receives the saddle of a bird and removes the legs at their thigh joints from the back of the carcass. Likewise, my copending U.S. Application filed July 12, 1983 describes a halving machine which cuts through the carcass between the breast and the saddle and through the back bone to divide the carcass in half so that each half can be processed separately.
Although the separate handling of the saddles and breasts of poultry carcasses tends to enable more accurate division of the carcasses to be made, the separate processing requires more manual handling of the carcasses and more pieces of equipment in the processing plant.